The Barelvi pushback

In Pakistan, state empowered the seminary by hiring proxy warriors from it. Then, the un-empowered developed their own street muscle, weaponising themselves through the underworld where jihad and crime meet

IN THE FIRST week of 2017, Lahore was paralysed by roadblocks set up by the government to deny entry to mobs opposed to the observance of the day Punjab Governor Salman Taseer was killed in 2011 by his police guard. Mumtaz Qadri, who shot him 27 times, was detailed to protect him against Islamist terrorists shadowing him for having opposed the blasphemy law. The name Qadri was a giveaway — carried by a sect that kills blasphemers — but Pakistan pretended not to know how murderous their schools of religious thought had become.

Taseer hadn’t insulted the Holy Prophet PBUH but had criticised the law for its flaws of excess, like death as minimum punishment without any room for mitigation. All religious parties backed by their seminaries are against amending the law to remove these flaws, but for the first time the country’s non-jihadist Barelvis had put on the warpaint and left the jihadists behind.

The most extreme Barelvis — named after a city, Bareilly, in India where this school was born — are found in Karachi where opposing jihadi Deobandi seminaries first aligned with the Taliban. Always preaching tough Islam, Deobandis received funds from Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies, occupying “soft” Barelvi mosques through sheer muscle. Deoband, of course, is another city in India that gave rise to hardline Islam in the subcontinent reaching out to their hardline brethren, the Wahhabis, of Saudi Arabia. (Today, confronted by hard-shell Hinduism, the Deobandis of India defend India’s secular constitution!)

The Barelvis, not attractive to the state because of their quietist, mystically-oriented Islam, were crushed by Karachi’s Deobandi power but their instinct for survival gradually toughened them and they started pushing back, becoming violent in the process. The leader in this “rejuvenation” was Sunni Tehreek whose leader, Sarwat Ejaz Qadri, much cushioned by the wealth and power of violence, today challenges the centres of power in Lahore and Islamabad. When police constable Qadri was hanged in 2016, Sarwat shook the capital by remote-controlling a mammoth bearded mob till the rulers quaked with fear and allowed the construction of a magnificent mausoleum to the killer constable just outside Islamabad, ready for pilgrims.

When the Lahore administration learned that Sarwat Qadri was remote-guiding another mammoth assault against a dozen moderate votaries of Salman Taseer observing his anniversary, it deployed containers to block the posh Gulberg area where the human rights workers were thrashed by bearded Barelvi hoods last year. The city was brought to a standstill and many had to spend the day stuck on top of overhead bridges. The local Barelvi organisation deployed was blasphemy-specific Labbaik Ya Rasool (I am ready O Prophet), composed of internal migrants newly arrived from their villages in cities they couldn’t afford to live in — desperate to survive but ready for violence for a religion they hardly understood. And funds are no problem if you have a presence in Karachi, connected with the underworld of target-killers, and have the manpower to offer protection to people who can pay for it. Most charity in Pakistan thus turns out to be protection money.

Governor Taseer’s son, Shaan Taseer, has been speaking out on social media against the persecution of non-muslims in the name of blasphemy. The minority most often targeted are the Christians whose charity-run schools and hospitals take in the very Muslims who look away when Christians are caught in the death-trap of the blasphemy law. In many cases, blasphemy is applied to entire communities asked to vacate properties “confiscated” under dubious traditions (hadith) in favour of those who organise the mobs. Shaan has been speaking out in favour of the Ahmadis more dangerously because they are declared apostate under the Second Amendment of the Constitution of Pakistan. Needless to say, he got a fatwa of death slapped on him by an unknown cleric and is now in exile. His brother, Shahbaz, kidnapped by Taliban-connected terrorists, had spent several years in captivity in Afghanistan.

The state empowered the seminary by hiring proxy warriors from it. Then those who were un-empowered decided to develop their own street muscle, weaponising themselves through the underworld where jihad and crime meet. There was a time when the Barelvis used to assert themselves peacefully; but in 2006, they received a jolt when most of their top leaders were killed by a Deobandi suicide-bomber at Karachi’s Nishtar Park while the state, beholden to Deobandi jihad, feigned shock.

Lahore’s killer mob was finally defanged through the arrest of 150 Labbaik men, but in Karachi, a repercussion of this arrest pointed to the real ground zero of trouble. Outside the Karachi Press Club, Sunni Tehreek staged a demonstration to counter the gatherings organised in different parts of the country honouring Salman Taseer on his death anniversary. What they did to the club highlights once again the immunity enjoyed by the violent in Pakistan.

They attacked the walls of the press club carrying portraits of men and women who served the people and worked for their rights. They took special pleasure in defacing the likenesses of the ladies who had achieved great status by simply working for humanity. Yasmeen Lari, of the Orangi Pilot Project, Research & Training Institute director Perween Rahman (killed), novelist Fatima Surayya Bajia, T2F founder Sabeen Mahmud (killed) and freelance journalist, Zubeida Mustafa. The press club secretary later played safe by saying: “There were several people here last night, and it was difficult to take note of any particular individual”. And what action was taken? “We caught two of the six vandals but they managed to escape”.

The writer is consulting editor, ‘Newsweek Pakistan’ THE WORLD’S ELITE, including political leaders and corporate titans, met at the annual World Economic Forum last week in Davos, where the smugness that comes with being invited to an exclusive event was overshadowed by the tumultuous political events of the past year for the global economy. The Forum discussed the contents of the Global Risks Report which identified a number of threats to the world order. At the top of this list, perhaps surprisingly, is not terrorism or climate change but the result of the neo-liberal policies which Davos itself exemplifies — income inequality. The report invokes the rich and powerful to suggest that a fundamental reform of capitalism is necessary to tackle the public anger which it blames not just for the popularity of Donald Trump, but also Brexit. On this matter, at least, the Davos plutocrats and I are in complete agreement.

If public anger is the result of inequality, then the recent Credit Suisse Annual Report on Global Wealth for 2016 should alarm Indian society. To be sure, the report was only documenting in stark numbers something any casual observer — who is not hiding his/her face behind a newspaper while his/her car stops at a traffic light to shut out those pesky street kids clamouring for a few spare coins— witnesses every day, every hour, every minute in this country. India is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and this inequality is growing at an astonishing pace.

Here are some sobering findings of the report. In 2016, the richest 1 per cent in India owned nearly 60 per cent of the country’s total wealth; in contrast, the equivalent figure for most western European nations is between 20 per cent to 30 per cent. The top 20 per cent commanded a staggering 80 per cent, while the entire bottom half of the country owned a pathetic 2 per cent. In the past six years, this share of wealth has shot up by an astounding 45 per cent.

India was already more unequal, by a margin of 15 percentage points, than even the US where Bernie Sanders had declared that “a nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little.” In dishing out such grotesque injustice, we are far ahead of China and most other middle-income countries. The only major economy which beats us, and to which our billionaire barons, their economic gurus and their chums in India’s ruling classes can look up to, is Russia.

The causes and significance of inequality have long divided economists and politicians across the ideological spectrum, but the evidence on its impact on society is emphatic. In their classic book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, Kate Pickett and Richard